First Cartoon: Michael Maslin

It’s been almost thirty-four years since Michael Maslin’s first cartoon appeared in the magazine, on April 17th, 1978. We’ve decided to celebrate the event by having the man himself tell you all about it. Take it away, Michael.

On the Ides of March, 1978, I brought in yet another batch of cartoons to the magazine. I’d been submitting for seven years (since I was sixteen years old), with no success, although I’d sold an idea to The New Yorker a year earlier—an idea that was eventually executed by Whitney Darrow, Jr. Here’s the drawing I submitted.

And here is the published version by Darrow.

I drew “Nothing will ever happen to you” in a style in which you rapidly drew a subject without ever looking down at your drawing pad, which accounts for the fact that it looks as though I never looked down at my drawing pad.

Whitney Darrow’s version showed that he clearly did. Good for him, although I sort of felt that was cheating.

Nevertheless, I was proud that my idea at least had gotten into The New Yorker, but my goal was not to supply established cartoonists with ideas, but to see my own drawings published.

That March, I’d gone uptown to the magazine’s offices, then located at 25 West Forty-third Street, dropped off a new batch of cartoons, and retrieved last week’s rejected submissions. Back home in my apartment, I looked through the envelope of rejected work and discovered a cartoon was missing—this one:

I didn’t think it was the strongest drawing in the batch. As there was no note explaining its absence, and thinking perhaps it had fallen behind a filing cabinet or something, I decided to call the magazine.

Anne Hall, the assistant to Lee Lorenz, the Art Editor, spoke to me and said the drawing probably was misplaced, and…well, would I hold while she looked into it? When Anne came back on the line, she said, “Mr. Maslin, I’m sorry, the drawing wasn’t misplaced—they bought it.”

I said, “They bought it? The whole thing?” (in reference to the previous purchase—you know, when they just bought the idea).

Anne replied, “Yes, the whole thing.”

P.S. I asked Michael to talk some more about the evolution of his drawing style. Here’s what he had to say:

“Nothing will ever happen to you” was drawn in a style I’d brought to New York City directly from my gesture-drawing exercises at the University of Connecticut (with a huge amount of Thurber influence thrown in). I started using the gesture-drawing style because it was so not technical. Almost all of my college work looks like Thurberized gesture drawings. Thurber’s work helped free me, and, having been freed, my style then became a blend of cartoonists’ styles that I loved. I borrowed liberally from the masters. For instance, I adopted Richard Taylor’s use of shading on window panes, and Charles Addams’s tiled floors. I was influenced by the way Steinberg drew the flashing lights of police cars and the way George Price handled perspective, by the drama of Peter Arno’s shadows and by George Booth’s carpets.

By the time “I’ll have a quarter pound of your most reliable cheese” was published—just months after the fortune-teller drawing was submitted—my work had already changed, and was still very much in flux. Many, many drawings later, I’m still borrowing and still convinced things haven’t settled down on my drawing paper.

P.P.S. Over seven hundred of Michael’s “whole things” have been published since 1978. They are available on The Cartoon Bank. And, as I’ve pointed out before, Michael has a wonderful site of his own, Ink Spill, where you can keep up with New Yorker cartoonists news and events.